mood

PROMPT: Fragility, broken bowl, putting things on the high shelf to keep them safe from others

***

She picked up the bowl and smashed it against the floor. She pulled the best glasses off the high shelf where she’d put them out of guests’ reach. Arms overhead, she let them fall away and explode into rubble. Without pausing, she stomped her rainboots across the shattered glass, the shards of pottery, straight out the door into the night.

Six hours earlier…

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This is apparently going to be one of those nights when I cannot find the part of my brain that knows how to write. My left eye is twitching from lack of sleep and I spent much of today writing comments for tomorrow’s Coastal Commission meeting and my attempts at inventing characters, plot, motivation have fallen flat here. I need some vegetables. I need exercise. I need to stretch my body. My mind has been pulled in enough directions, too many directions, it is currently like the elastic in my old swimsuit – drooping. So instead of writing fiction, I’m doing the equivalent of morning pages now, purging the random shit, the constant shit, that takes up space, in hopes a clear path will lead to clarity, although I do not see the manifestation of anything quality tonight. I am more in the mood to break than to create. Eight-hundred-and-one days ago, whiskey would have been my conduit, but now, well, it’s not. 

I have such a list of – well, everything. 

I have a list of Things I Want to Write.

The Prompt book.

An op-ed or blog post about the uselessness of parenting experts.

A series of posts on Humboldt County medical care or, more specifically, the lack of it.

The wonderfulness of robots and how they free women from the mundane even if what they free us for is to be cogs in the capitalist machine.

The absolutely certainty that something is wrong with my brain because why else would I be like this and fuck, how embarrassing.

An activism guide or memoir or combination, something that will give me enough gravitas and legitimacy to qualify me to deliver a keynote speech somewhere, some time. That is a hilarious thing to type. 

Sometimes I think about finishing that novel whose pieces sit like a disassembled puzzle waiting to be put together. 

Anyway, tonight I am like the cheese plate they brought us. Disappointing and out of proportion and tapering off without a satisfying end.